Along With Dolls and Stuffed Animals, Making Time for Immigration Activism

Katherine Figueroa, 13, made a plea to President Obama after she watched on television as her parents were arrested in 2009 in an immigration raid.Credit
Joshua Lott for The New York Times

PHOENIX — Her parents are criminals, technically speaking, having pleaded guilty to impersonation for falsifying a Social Security number to secure employment, a felony in this state. They were caught in a workplace raid led by Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2009, a tactic for catching illegal immigrants that solidified his reputation as a no-holds-barred lawman, but one that has turned out to be as questionable as it was effective.

The raid, which was televised live on a placid Saturday, seized her attention because it occurred at her parents’ workplace: the Lindstrom Family Auto Wash.

Katherine Figueroa, 9 years old at the time, dropped the game of bingo she had been playing and stared at the screen, where she spotted her father, Carlos Figueroa, the carwash’s supervisor, hands bound before him as he was led to a sheriff’s office van that took him to jail, where he spent 90 days. Her mother, Sandra, who worked at the vacuuming station, was close behind.

Katherine cried. She screamed. Then, inside the tidy trailer her family still calls home, she sat before a video camera and delivered a plea: “Mr. President, I want you to help me, and my family, and my parents. I want them back.”

She was just getting started.

On Wednesday, in a courtroom here where cases like the Figueroas’ often end in tear-filled goodbyes and deportation, Katherine, who is now 13, reaped the rewards of four years of activism, an unlikely role for a child whose idea of a pastime was playing with dolls, not debating immigration policy.

The case against her parents was effectively closed after the federal authorities, invoking the discretion that the Obama administration has afforded them, offered the couple a reprieve based on their strong family ties to this country and without regard for their criminal record. The outcome highlighted the tension among forces in a state whose combative stance against illegal immigration sparked a divisive debate across the country, after years of relentless pushing by Sheriff Arpaio, Gov. Jan Brewer and the Arizona Legislature.

Advocates for immigrants, already emboldened by a federal judge’s decision in May that Sheriff Arpaio had violated the constitutional rights of Latinos by making them the targets of traffic stops and raids, feel empowered.

“We’ve been able to challenge the notion that deportation is about sending the worst criminals away,” said Carlos Garcia, executive director of Puente, a grass-roots group that has worked with Katherine from the start.

The judge’s ruling resulted from a federal civil trial over a class-action lawsuit accusing Sheriff Arpaio and the Maricopa County sheriff’s office of singling out Latinos. It is the same argument used by the Justice Department in the case it filed against the sheriff, which is pending, and part of the reasoning employed by Delia Salvatierra, an immigration lawyer, in a brief she filed on behalf of Katherine’s parents.

Ms. Salvatierra pointed out the “unintentional conflict” as the department, through its immigration-enforcement arm, was moving to deport a couple whose criminal conviction stemmed from a practice its civil rights division had deemed unconstitutional.

“There are so many people in this town who were deported because they were convicted after workplace raids by the sheriff’s office, but this family, this child, they stood up to the sheriff and they prevailed,” she said.

Sheriff Arpaio, in a statement, said that his deputies “were enforcing the state criminal laws of identification theft and forgery” in the raid.

“If the Obama administration wishes to permit convicted felons who are legal residents of another country to take up residence in the United States,” he went on, “that is the U.S. government’s decision to make.”

Sitting on her bunk bed — covered in pink sheets, adorned by stuffed animals and situated at the edge of the family’s living room — Katherine said, “It’s not that simple.” When parents are detained or deported, she said, theirs are not the only lives that are upended.

Among students at her elementary school, there were others living in fear, she recalled. She was the first to speak up.

She addressed Congress in 2010. She testified before the Arizona Legislature in 2011 against a proposal to take away citizenship rights of children born in the state to parents who had entered the country illegally, telling lawmakers, “We are the future.”

Her case was depicted in a documentary, “Two Americans.” She also played herself on a video by the Mexican-American band La Santa Cecília, re-enacting the raid that ensnared her parents and others.

In all of those moments, “I felt free because I could say whatever I wanted to,” she said. “I wanted there to be justice for my parents and justice for the fathers and mothers whose only crime was to work.”

Carlos and Sandra Figueroa climbed over the border fence in Nogales in 1998, seven months after they were married in Mexico City and decided there was no future for them there, Mr. Figueroa said. They have another child, Alondra, 2, and they hope to buy a house soon, to give all of them more space.

A version of this article appears in print on July 18, 2013, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Along With Dolls and Stuffed Animals, Making Time for Immigration Activism. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe